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There were better ways to die. And there were worse ways to die. Blue was familiar with all sides of the experience, as much as she wished she wasn’t.
It was all part of the experience. Being a part of MIRA meant impossible tasks and constant failure. Not a single damn ship in the fleet could make it more than an hour without something breaking down, even without the added sabotage from infiltrating parties.
Blue was a company woman, through and through. Even when her stomach was in her throat and she could barely choke down dinner she would keep following orders. It certainly didn’t help that the pre-packaged trays were ashy when “freshly” restocked and deplorable when they were three weeks out from their last waystation. But that was just how things were.
Every so often someone would get a bad packet and they’d go down quick. Botulism, or something similar enough from whatever microbiome existed on the planet where the packet had been prepped. Tragic, really. Blue checked her seals dutifully before every meal and helped heft the legs on whoever hadn’t when they dragged the body to Storage.
Quick but not painless. There were plenty of options like that. Electrocution from ungrounded wiring, flash-suffocation from the engine HVAC dumping fumes into the engineering bays, and the always horrifying impalement from infiltrators - Blue had seen so many variations of those. Maybe not in person, but the feeds from security were clear enough.
Screaming, maybe some sobbing if there was enough air for it, and then silence. Always the silence swept in just as swiftly as their passing.
Yeah. Quick deaths were a dime a dozen on a MIRA ship.
The slow ones, those ones scared Blue on a deeper level. Sure, she was worried about forgetting her rubberized gloves for fixing wires but if she followed the routines and regimens then she was doing okay. But one couldn’t really defend against slow radiation poisoning from an unshielded delivery that no one on the station screened for or the agonizing wait for the fuel cells to finally give out because the mission commander decided to skip port call and there wasn’t enough fuel to finish the hyperspace jump.
Every time that someone died on a MIRA ship, there was always the same protocol. After the issue was resolved - the electrical panel shut down and wires re-grounded, the galley to clean out anything older than the allowed 2 months past shelf life, the slithering, writing mass that had feigned being Lt. Green was run through with a fork truck - the bodies went to Storage.
They all went to Storage in the end, even Blue she supposed. Storage had the airlocks. The only route on or off of a MIRA vessel.
How many times, exactly, had Blue hauled the lifeless - more or less - form of her fellow crewmates to their final resting place? Well, “resting place” wasn’t the right term. No one stayed there for long. Bodies had to go out the same door they had come in from.
Everyone had to go out that door. Even Blue. She had known it from the day she signed on - one day she would leave a MIRA ship for the last time. Foolishly she had thought it wouldn’t be because she’d died. And, hey, she had been right in a way.
After all, Blue wasn’t dead. Not yet anyways.
Seemed even after all her time spent watching crewmates and enemies alike die quick, slow, quick, quick, so damned quick that Blue had not earned herself one of those fast tracks out. She went out the airlock on her own two feet, hands clasped behind her head on the helmet. Red had called it a mercy, leaving the suit on her. She knew he was really just terrified that she might actually have been an impostor.
Would an impostor have spent four whole damn years on flights without a day of shore leave? Would an impostor have bothered to show Orange how to trick the engine reboot sequence into taking just one person’s palm print instead of two? Would an impostor have--- oh what did it matter?
The ship idled out of hyperdrive. Blue caught sight of it every time that her slow momentum spun her around again. The red “re-fasten tether” pop-up on her helmet display was almost as bright as the O2 level indicator. She didn’t have long, spinning out here in open space. Maybe twenty, thirty more gasps.
Blue’s hand slapped on the unseal button on her suit, hot tears running over her cheeks as the damned safety mechanism refused her her god given right to die. Of all the things Blue knew about death and dying, she didn’t know how in the hell she was supposed to handle it on her own.
Everyone left the ship through the airlock. She had just been stupid enough to assume that she would have been able to do it on her own terms instead of the ship majority’s.